Casserole of Late Fall Greens
I have a pile of recipes from the Greenmarket tucked in a corner of my bookshelf. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon one from 2009 at the same time my fridge was filled with kale and collard greens from my CSA. Since then I've been hoping for more kale every week at CSA pick-up. This casserole (I like to call it a kale gratin) is fantastic and so delicious. Better after a day in the fridge and re-heated, as the flavors meld. I won't stop making this until the late fall greens stop!
Casserole of Late Fall Greens
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs
Kosher salt and fresh black pepper
1 cup heavy cream
2 cloves of garlic, smashed and peeled
2 1/2 ounces of bacon (about 3 strips)
2 cups of cooked winter greens (spinach, swiss chard, kale, broccoli raab, etc.)
1/3 cup freshly grated hard cheese (cow's or sheep's milk would be best, I use Pecorino)
1. Prepare and cook the greens, removing any tough stems, and roughly chop. (To yield 2 cups cooked you will need 1 pound of spinach or broccoli raab, 1 3/4 pounds of swiss chard, or 1 1/4 pounds of kale.) Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil and cook until the greens are tender. Drain and squeeze to remove excess water.
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 4 cup shallow gratin dish. Toss together the breadcrumbs and 1 tablespoon of melted butter with a pinch of kosher salt and little ground pepper and set aside.
3. In a medium saucepan, bring the cream and garlic to a boil over medium-high heat and then turn down the heat and simmer vigorously until the cream is reduced to about 3/4 cup. Take the pan off the heat, remove and discard the garlic cloves. Let the cream cool slightly and then season with 1/4 teaspoon of salt and a few grinds of black pepper.
4. In a large skillet, cook the bacon until crisped and browned. Drain on a paper towel and remove almost all of the excess fat from the pan. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon of butter and return the pan to the heat. Add the cooked greens with 1/4 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring constantly for 1 minute. Evenly spread the warmed greens in the gratin dish.
5. Crumble the bacon over the greens. Sprinkle on the cheese. Pour the seasoned cream over the greens/bacon/cheese and top with the bread crumbs. Bake until brown and bubbly, about 25 minutes. Let it rest for 10 to 15 minutes before serving.
From the 100-Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change, via NYC Greenmarket Recipe Series
Easy yummy fish with zucchini
It's that time of year when I make Zucchini-Wrapped Fish Fillets as much as possible. Tonight I used Greenmarket flounder and it was perfect. As long as your fish won't flake too much and fall apart, sub whatever catches your fancy. The light flavor and basil essence makes this one of my favorite hot weather fish preparations.
Fantastic cookbook for healthy eating
Hidden in our food supply
Great video below from Robyn O'Brien speaking at TEDxAustin about untested GMOs in our food supply. While most of the information was familiar to me, it reminded me once again why I shop and cook the way I do for myself and my family.
There are two old-time meat stores in my neighborhood and I prefer to buy my meat there rather than Whole Foods. But it's not organic or grass-fed. So those beef cows are most likely being fattened on a fed lot with genetically modified corn. The talk got me thinking about that, and wondering what to do. Stop supporting the butcher whose craft is disappearing? Ask him to buy grass-finished beef? Why has eating gotten so complicated?
Juice is junk food
Perhaps in response to my rant about marketers and bloggers, I received an email yesterday inviting me to join #WelchsGrape Twitter Party! The purpose of this "party" is to spread the idea "Moms can help their families live a heart healthy lifestyle with Welch's 100% Grape juice made with Concord Grapes."
One easy and delicious way to add more purple to your family's diet is to drink 4-oz. of grape juice, which offers a full serving (1/2 cup) of fruit and no added sugar.
This is pretty disingenuous. Grape juice is loaded with natural sugar. I can't even imagine how you'd drink it if they added sugar. A 64 oz bottle of Welch's Grape Juice contains 8 8 fl oz. servings. Each 8 fl oz serving (1 cup) contains 40 grams of sugar. One can of Pepsi (335 ml or ~1 1/2 US cups) contains 40 grams of sugar.
40 grams of sugar next to a Pepsi, image from funnyz
Think about that: 1 cup of grape juice is basically 1 can of Pepsi. Official US Guidelines advise a maximum of 40 grams refined sugar for every 2000 calories consumed per day. So give your kid even 1/2 cup of grape juice and you've given them more than half the sugar maximum an adult should consume as day. This isn't right because the guideline is for added sugar, like when you see "sugar" in the ingredients list for tomato sauce. Grape juice has no added sugar, but it's concentrated to make it sweeter. There is no guideline for how much naturally-occurring sugar you should ingest.
It's hart to believe any possible heart benefits associated with grape juice outweigh the risks of ingesting so much sugar (with none of the fiber or slower digestive process to access it that you get from eating whole fruit rather than mainlining juice!) If you haven't yet read Is Sugar Toxic?, get thee to the New York Times post haste:
The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form -- soda or fruit juices -- the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.
In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it's clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers.
The whole article is worth a read. Then you can decide for yourself if filling your kids with juice is "heart-healthy" and if you want to join the Twitter party to spread the word. Or you can crash the party with me (if naps coordinate with party time) and point people to some sane information about kids and sugar.
And I don't even want to get started on the idea that drinking juice counts as a serving of fruit! That's about as specious as ketchup being a vegetable.
Rolling the dough
Two photos from making cookies at Christmas from my mom, who finally got around to posting them. This was Minna's first time using her new rolling pin. As you can tell, Ollie's used his a lot!
The pastry bag
We don't let Ollie watch any TV and his computer/iPad/iPhone screen time is regulated. But when he gets the iPad, one of his favorite things to do is watch YouTube videos, which he picks from ones I've favorited. At some point I favorited a video of a woman making a fire truck cake because it's similar to the one I made for Ollie's 2nd birthday. He's watched this one, and many related cake-making videos, more than anything else. Often he mentions "Laurie Gaylin" when we're in the kitchen, and I had to ask, "Who's that?" Turns out she's the woman making all the cakes in his videos. Here's the fire truck cake:
So Sunday morning I was running around the house, trying to get stuff done before friends came over to watch the Super Bowl. Talking half to myself and half to Ollie, I said, "I've got to find my pastry bag!" because I wanted to pipe the deviled egg filling into the whites. (This may seem like overkill but it's way easier and faster than trying to get that yolky glue off a spoon.)
Ollie casually says, "Or a freezer bag."
"What?" I ask him, not understanding what he's even talking about.
"Or a freezer bag," he repeats to me. "Laurie Gaylin says you can use a pastry bag or a frosting bag or just a freezer bag."
Fellow bakers, your mouth must have dropped when you read that sentence, as mine did when he said it. The kid is really learning something from all those videos.
(Turns out her name is Laurie Gelman, and she's the host, not the baker. But who quibbles with a three year old?)
Eating well and working less
Great "A Food Manifesto for the Future" from Mark Bittman containing some concrete suggestions to improve the food supply and with it, the health, of Americans. But I really liked comment #2: I can't imagine how Americans can possibly eat well until they are working less hours. I've been meaning to write about this for ages and am so glad to see someone else raise this issue. In all the discussion of obesity and diabetes, no one seems to mention how much time it takes to cook good food, and how hard that is when both parents are working and commuting long distances. I easily spend ninety minutes a day cooking for my family. Nearly every day. I'm lucky to have the time to do it.
That said I did read recently that Americans watch an average of thirty-four hours of TV a week. If that's true then clearly there's some wiggle room in the day for proper cooking, right?
Made up baking with kids
Recently Ollie's been talking about a time he lived "in England." Whenever he begins a sentence with "In England..." I know he'll follow with something that displays his independence and self-sufficiency. Often the stories are about cooking, and he'll tell me about things he baked in England. Sometimes there are adventures with his cousins, Strawberry and Pumpkin, with whom he lived, and he had some jobs and drove a lot as well. But mostly it's about cooking.
Lately I indulge his "In England" baking stories and we recreate his favorite recipes. He instructs me on the ingredients he used to create things like "Honeychrists", a kind of inedible biscuit like hardtack, and "Chocolate Chip Cookie Muffins", which we baked on Sunday.
After the honeychrists episode, I've tried to direct a little more, so these muffin cookies were actually edible and quite tasty. Half-way through the measuring, I got a great idea. Ratio, a book and iPhone app by Michael Ruhlman gives you the ratios for ingredients for all kinds of recipe, would be perfect for this situation. (Though he doesn't have "cookie muffin" listed).
In the future I can guide Ollie knowing the ratios, so if he wants muffins, I can measure 5 ounces of flour and liquid, and 2.5 ounces eggs and butter. He can add the spices or food coloring or chocolate chips, whatever else he wants, and I can be assured that the resulting baked good will probably be edible. I'm looking forward to trying this out, as it's been so much fun to do this crazy baking with Ollie.
Funny thing about the chocolate chip muffin cookies: they were edible! And because I added baking powder and baking soda, they were puffy cookies, soft and kind of doughy, wide-spread on the sheet and mounded in the middle. Just like you'd expect a "muffin cookie" to be!
I'm honored to be a judge in this year's Piglet Tournament of Cookbooks over at Food 52. My review of Good to the Grain vs Heart of the Artichoke ran yesterday. A perfect Thanksgiving post. And two great cookbooks. It was really a great experience to participate. Thanks Food 52!
Catching razor clams
I've dug/raked for my fair share of shellfish (oysters, steamers, littlenecks and mussels) but I'd never harvested razor clams. I've seen their shells all over the beaches, but until a few years ago never realized people ate them. Then I had them roasted with butter and garlic at St. John's in London and fell in love! While reading my new Forgotten Skills of Cooking I learned a simple way to catch razor clams: pour salt in their hole and watch them wriggle out!
That's crazy! I can't wait to try it! Also if anyone knows a good source for buying razor clams in New York City, please let me know. I want to start eating them more regularly.
My copy of Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best - Over 700 Recipes Show You Why by Darina Allen arrived today and I'm very excited to get started with it. Foraging for seaweeds and shellfish looks especially up my alley. And as I read the introduction I puffed up a bit with pride. The author complains of so many young people who don't know basic things (like butter comes from cream!) about where food comes from or what it looks like in its natural state. I realized that in his short life, Ollie's picked asparagus, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, black raspberries, rhubarb and (not ripe) blackberries. Not bad for a just 3 years old New York City native.
Looking for a great, easy summer soup for supper? Cucumber and Avocado Soup (you've gotta scroll down to it) is so yummy and easy to make that I'm going to make it three or four times a week this summer. Yes it's that tasty, and you wouldn't think so with how healthy is. Win win.
An easy baby shower
I threw a baby shower for a close friend over the weekend and I'm so pleased with how the recipes turned out, I thought I'd share. It was a "Ladies Tea" theme, without the tea and without much more theme than simply that. But here's what we had:
Cucumber Mint Tea Sandwiches
Chicken Salad Tea Sandwiches (the taragon made these special)
Smoked Salmon and Endive Tea Sandwiches
Goat Cheese and Watercress Tea Sandwiches
Fruit Salad with Ginger Syrup
For drinks I made a sparkling pink lemonade (frozen concentrate and seltzer, voila!) and served a sparkling rose wine. But the highlight was dessert: a Lavender Lemon Bundt Cake. This was actually suggested by my son Ollie (not the flavor, the bundt idea) because he pointed out we wouldn't need to use the mixer for frosting (though we did need it for the cake, much to his disappointment...). He sure was prescient because Sunday morning as I was scrambling to get everything prepared, I sure wouldn't have enjoyed making a layer cake and whipping buttercream. And I didn't have the time.
For flowers I used baby food jars with the labels removed and tied with some twine around the top. I filled them with dusty pink roses from the deli around the corner. They looked fancy though! All in all it was a beautiful, delicious afternoon. And when I get a chance, I'll try and share a photo.
Oh! And I almost forgot: I made half pints of strawberry jam for all the ladies to take home as presents.
Felled by the Pine Nut Mouth
I made Straw and Hay Fettuccine Tangle on Saturday night (btw Heidi's Super Natural Cooking is awesome, I love it!) for dinner. Monday for lunch I ate the leftovers, including a bunch of whole pine nuts that had fallen to the bottom of the dish. By Tuesday evening I had a weird taste in the back of my throat, so weird that when I when I woke up during the night, I couldn't get back to sleep. Was is the allergy pill I'd taken for the first time this year? The strong cheese and rind I ate for dinner? The strong wine that accompanied it?
By yesterday the strange taste hadn't abated, despite multiple teeth brushings and flossings, tongue scrapings, and mouthwash swirlings. I turned to Twitter for guidance. And almost immediately people replied asking if I'd eaten pine nuts recently. At first I ignored, but as more people mentioned, I was curious. Then someone said to Google "Chinese pine nuts" and lo a diagnosis: Pine Nut Mouth! (aka "Pine Mouth" or "Pine Nut Syndrome") Seems that there are a lot of pine nuts on the market these days imported from China and they're causing people to get a metallic taste in the back of the throat after ingesting, sometimes lasting up to two weeks!
I'm happy to report my case is resolving and I actually enjoyed my breakfast, but until today food's been so off-putting, I haven't wanted to eat. My pine nuts were from Whole Food's bulk bin, and I stored them in the fridge. They didn't taste rancid when I prepared them, so I'm not thinking it's rancidity-related. I'm going to go back and investigate where they're from to confirm China. And if I can bare to eat pine nuts again this summer, I'm splurging for Italian imports. Right now, that's a big if.
Lazy jam is a relative term
On Wednesday I began the 3-day journey that is making a Christine Ferber jam and by Friday afternoon had four pints of "Strawberry with Pinot Noir and Spices". On Thursday I was able to bang out 7 1/2 pints of traditional strawberry jam like I make with my grandmother. I realized that this doesn't sound very lazy, but if you know how to do something, it's not hard. And somehow I equate not hard with lazy I guess. Regardless, it was lots of fun and I'm really looking forward to making many different jams and preserves this summer, "putting up" lots of the Greenmarket's bounty for fall and winter.
A couple notes: I didn't bother with Ferber's Green Apple Jelly for pectin (I can't be bothered to make jelly to make jam), I just used half a package of pectin (since Ferber's recipe called for approximately half the berries and sugar of a Certo pectin recipe). Jam set fine so I think if I make more of Ferber's jams (which I'd like to) I'll just sub store-bought pectin instead.
I tried the "fancy" jam (as Ollie calls the Pinot and Spice) with my English muffin this morning. You know what? I like my plain old Grandma Pete's traditional better.
I also made a rhubarb compote (1 cup chopped rhubarb, 1/2 cup sugar, juice of half an orange and its zest, I think...) that I've been putting on pancakes. So good!! And a little trick on the pancakes I pulled yesterday that no one seemed to notice: I sub'd 1 cup of AP flour for whole wheat pastry flour (inspired by an awesome banana muffin recipe I've been making that I'll tell you about soon) and the pancakes were still delicious, and I like to think a tiny bit healthier.
So yeah, I've been busy. And I didn't even tell you about everything I did in the garden today!
Some lazy jam making coming up
If you've read this site for a while, you know I've got a thing about strawberries and making jam. Today Ollie and I bought four quarts of berries at the Union Square Greenmarket so we could make some jam together. Looking perhaps to break with tradition, I opened Mes Confitures: The Jams and Jellies of Christine Ferber for some different recipes. Oooh, "Rhubarb and Whole Strawberries" seemed like just the thing! Until this:
The third day, bring this mixture to a boil 5 times. Do this sequence again four times at 8-hour intervals.
What?! Am I making jam or birthing a newborn jam baby?! Rhubarb's going to be a simple compote for yogurt and ice cream, not even canned. For the strawberries I'm thinking it's either "Strawberry with Pinot Noir and Spices", adapted for my lazy one-day jam technique, or the basic Strawberry Jam I always make with my grandmother.
Cooking for Minna
I've been really getting into cooking again, which is a good thing for Minna because it means I've been making lots of yummy things for her to eat. As I type a big batch of Chicken, Sweet Potatoes and Apple is bubbling on the stove. This was one of my favorites for Ollie because it just tasted so yummy! I've also made roasted sweet potatoes and broccoli -- just puree them together with butter and a little milk.
But I think the best I've made yet is my "New England Special" as I call it: baked squash and apples. I cut an acorn squash in half and put on a baking sheet. I took an apple, cored it, and filled the hole with raisins, cinnamon, and butter. Roasted both in oven until soft and tender, then ran through food mill. Very tasty!
At dinner she usually eats some of what we're having, but these foods, frozen in little cubes, are handy for lunch when she's out and about, or if we're not eating an easy dinner for sharing.
Dinner plan for this evening is a recommendation from Adriana: Capellini with Fresh Ricotta. Looks easy and sounds delicious. I only wish Ollie and I had time to make the fresh ricotta ourselves. I really want to make cheese with him, seems like it would be a fun cooking project. I guess if we like the recipe we'll plan to do that next time.
Was the change in fish consumption recommendations influenced by cash? Until recently, experts recommended women of childbearing age eat no more than 12 ounces of fish a week, and no more than 6 ounces of canned albacore tuna, because of high levels of mercury. But recently a new recommendation was released encouraging the consumption of at least 12 ounces of fish a week, the logic being that omega-3 consumption was important and outweighed the possible mercury risks. Now the New York Times is reporting that money from the seafood industry may be behind the new recommendations. Guh, and I was just about to go back to eating the nice albacore tuna too.
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